MLB.com's Carrie Muskat has been covering Major League Baseball since 1981 and is the author of "Banks to Sandberg to Grace: Five Decades of Love and Frustration with the Cubs." You can follow her on Twitter @CarrieMuskat. Here, she blogs about the Cubs.

11/26 Deer added to Sveum’s staff

Dale Sveum and Rob Deer, teammates on the Brewers from 1986-90, are together again. The Cubs have hired Deer as an assistant hitting coach, and he’ll join Sveum’s coaching staff, working with hitting coach James Rowson. Deer, 52, batted .220 in 11 big league seasons with the Giants, Brewers, Tigers, Red Sox from 1984-93, and then played part of ’96 with the Padres. He hit 230 home runs, including 33 in ’86 with Milwaukee, and also led the league in strikeouts four times (1987, ’88, ’91 and ’93). Sveum, who is entering his second season as the Cubs manager, came up in the Brewers organization and played for the big league team from 1986-91.

How can Deer be a hitting instructor when he has such a low batting average and struck out so many times?

“I answer that a lot,” Deer told Milwaukee sportswriter Drew Olson in a 2006 interview. “I don’t teach the way I hit. I understand how to hit .300. I know what it takes. We tell the guys to be selectively aggressive. We want that to be their approach. We tell them, ‘Be patiently aggressive.’ That’s our motto. What does it mean? If you get a good pitch to hit and you take it, that’s your fault. We don’t ever want to take aggressiveness away. But, we don’t want to swing at bad pitches either. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t want them to hit like I did.”

Hey Isabel – where have you been lately? Studying hard I hope. By the way, I hope you can go to the Cubs Convention in January. And I hope you can meet Barney. If you get to his table for signing autographs or anything be SURE TO TELL HIM YOUR NAME. LOL

Hey White-I have been studying beyond hard! Haha I have to make sure that GPA is up there! :) I hope to go too but my family don’t have enough money for them at this time. I hope to meet him too! Haha. And my name? Haha. Why do you say that? LOL!

Evidently the Cubs did not think highly enough of Deer’s capability to improve the hitting of their Allstar LaHair….who tore up AAA and has shown A LOT more ability to hit in the bigs than Jackson, Valbuena, Vitters, Cardenas etc. Gee, I guess the Cubs are not interested in a low cost, high average, left handed, power hitting, average fielding right fielder to compliment and help Rizzo produce some runs but are completley satisfied with a high cost, middling average, right handed, power hitting, average fielding left fielder with old knees, no fielding instincts, but a GREAT smile.
You would have thought that with Deer on board the Cubs would have invested in at least one more go around with LaHair, especially in 2013, a year they will not load up on awesome outfielders anyway.

lahair a high average? 250? hahaha… average fielder? in LF? hahaha…. joey you are funny… you will make anything up to bash won’t you? BTW Soriano’s average was 262 and had one fielding error…. lahair hit 250 and had 2 errors in RF in just 34 games(played in RF). Come on man

also Lahair wanted to go to Japan because he could make significantly more money there. The cubs were just doing him a favor by designating him. I honestly think he would still be a cub if Lahair didn’t want to leave.

It does give the impression of the organization “grasping at straws”. Superior talent would trump the revolving coaches door. But it appears our patience will be tested for a few years before we see that superior talent arrive. Not a bad thing, good things come to those who wait….103 years….

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